Researchers decode 80-year-old encrypted telegram
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A research group led by Professor Tomaž Pisanski from the University of Primorsko in Slovenia deciphered an encrypted telegram from 1944 with help from artificial intelligence.
The telegram originated from the Provincial Committee of Vos for Primorsko, a region of Slovenia, and had remained unreadable for over 80 years. Pisanski’s team used an AI model called claude, developed by Anthropic, to break the code.
The key to unlocking the message was discovering the phrase “MAŠČEVALNA PESEM” (meaning “revenge song”), which represented the cipher used, a double columnar transposition cipher. The University of Primorsko reported the discovery. The encrypted telegram was published as a puzzle on the Kriptogram portal of the Faculty of Computer and Information Science at the University of Ljubljana in 2018, challenging codebreakers. The original telegram is now held in the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia.
